Strangers to Ourselves

by Timothy D Wilson

  15. For writings on comparison levels, see Helson (1964); Brickman and Campbell (1971); and Parducci (1995).

  16. It may be that the optimal state is not a balance of zero, but a moderately positive balance. The body can "handle" mild positive states; and indeed, most people report being above the neutral point of happiness most of the time. Further, mildly positive emotions may well have beneficial effects, such as improving people's ability to think creatively (see Fredrickson 1998). But the body cannot handle prolonged, extreme positive emotions. People rarely experience euphoria for extended periods.

  17. On opponent process theory see Solomon (1980). For applications to drug addiction, see Koob et al. (1997). For a demonstration that opponent process theory does not explain well reactions to psychological (as opposed to physical) events, see Sandvik, Diener, and Larson (1985).

  18. See Erber (1996).

  19. Eisenberg (1994), p. 109.

  20. Shenk (2001), pp. 194-195.

  21. Gilbert and Wilson (2000). See also Vaillant (1993).

  22. See Gilbert et al. (1998); Wilson et at. (2000).

  23. See Griffin and Ross (1991); Ross and Nisbett (1991).

  24. See Schkade and Kahneman (1998); Wilson et al. (2000).

  25. Tatarkiewicz (1976), p. 111.

  8. Introspection and Self-Narratives

  Epigraph: Adams (1918), p. 432.

  1. Freud (1924/1968),p.306.

  2. Spence (1982), p. 27. As we will see later, some modern psychoanalysts have rejected the archaeology metaphor and its implication that what are being unearthed in therapy are ancient truths. For example, object relation theorists downplay the importance of unconscious drives rooted in childhood and focus more on conflicts in current relationships. For some psychoanalysts, the analogy of introspection as espionage works better, whereby a patient and therapist attempt to uncover secrets that are deliberately hidden from view. Unlike the archaeology metaphor, the secrets are not necessarily ancient ones rooted in childhood, but perhaps issues concerning current relationships with others. Like the archaeology metaphor, however, there are truths to be discovered and this discovery can be difficult.

  3. For a review of the evidence that introspection does not lead to more accurate reports about the self, see Silvia and Gendolla (2001).

  4. The introspection-as-narrative metaphor has become popular in various subdisciplines of psychology and psychiatry, espoused by psychoanalysts such as Roy Schafer (1976) and Donald Spence (1982), postmodernists such as Kenneth Gergen (1991), psychologists such as Jerome Bruner (1990) and Douglas McAdams (1996), and cognitive therapists such as Michael Mahoney (1995). These views have been somewhat parochial, however, with little cross-fertilization or empirical grounding. I believe that a version of the narrative metaphor can be applied to all forms of introspection, including off-the-cuff glances inward, long-term selfexamination, and psychotherapy.

  5. As Donald Spence put it, "But as he [ Freud] became more clinically experienced, he began to back away from this [archaeological] model and adopt a more moderate stand about the historical truth value of his analytic work, and in his final paper on the topic, he seems to have taken the position ... that'an assured conviction of the truth of the construction ... achieves the same therapeutic result as a recaptured memory"'; Spence (1982), p. 289, quoting Freud (1937/1976), p. 266.

  6. There is research evidence consistent with this interpretation of the flashlight metaphor. For example, several studies have found that people who introspect about how they feel report feelings that are especially good predictors of their future behavior, suggesting that the introspection focused their attention on feelings that were accessible but not currently the focus of consciousness. Fora review of these studies see Wilson and Dunn (1986).

  7. Barnes (2000), p. 69.

  8. Quoted in Goodman (1945), p. 746.

  9. Vargas Llosa (1986), p. 23.

  10. Quoted in Zajonc (1980), p. 155.

  1 1. Roethke (1965), p. 249.

  12. Kant (1785/1949), Second Section.

  13. Wilson and Kraft (1993). In another study we manipulated the kinds of thoughts about a new acquaintance that came to people's mind when people analyzed reasons, by making either positive or negative thoughts about this person easier to remember. As we expected, when positive thoughts were easy to remember people wrote about these thoughts in their reasons and then changed their attitude toward this person in a positive direction. When negative thoughts were easy to remember people wrote about these thoughts in their reasons and then changed their attitudes in a negative direction. A control group of people also found it easier to recall positive or negative information, but didn't analyze why they felt the way they did, and did not change their attitudes toward the person. Rather, it was the act of introspecting about one's reasons that led people to change their minds about how they felt. People assume that there is something particularly diagnostic about the reasons that they think of, not realizing that these reasons do not always capture their true feelings. See Wilson, Hodges, and LaFleur (1995).

  14. The studies on dating couples are reported in Wilson and Kraft (1993) and Wilson et al. (1984). The study on art posters is reported in Wilson et al. (1993). Other studies have found that analyzing reasons reduces the accuracy of people's predictions about their own behavior (Wilson and LaFleur 1995), leads to attitudes that correspond less with the opinion of experts (Wilson and Schooler 1991), and reduces the accuracy of predictions about objective, real-world events, such as the outcome of basketball games (Hal- berstadt and Levine 1999). In a related line of research, Jonathan Schooler and colleagues have found that introspecting about one's memory for stimuli that were stored without words-such as faces or colors-impairs mem ory for these stimuli. They argue that trying to put nonverbal memories into words makes it more difficult to recall what cannot be captured with words. See Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990); Schooler and Fiore (1997).

  15. See Schultheiss and Brunstein (1999); Schultheiss (in press).

  16. Lyubomirsky, Caldwell, and Nolen-Hoeksema (1998), pp. 168 and 174. For overviews of the work on rumination see Nolen-Hoeksema (1998, 2000).

  17. Pennebaker (1997b), p. 162.

  18. For reviews of research on writing about emotional events see Pennebaker (1997a, 1997b) and Smyth ( 1998).

  19. Hawthorne (1850/ 1996), chap. 11.

  20. Pennebaker, Zech, and Rime (in press).

  21. See Wegner (1994).

  22. Fels (2001), p. F5.

  23. See Sloane et al. (1975); Kelly (1990).

  9. Looking Outward to Know Ourselves

  1. For reviews of research on subliminal influence, see Moore (1992); Pratka- nis (1992); Theus (1994). A review by Dijksterhuis, Aarts, and Smith (2001) is more sanguine about the possibility of subliminal influence, but acknowledges that even effects found under controlled laboratory conditions tend to be small in magnitude.

  2. For reviews of the effects of everyday advertising, see Abraham and Lodish (1990); Wells (1997).

  3. For more on mental contamination, see Wilson and Brekke (1994); Wilson, Centerbar, and Brekke (in press).

  4. For a discussion of changes in measures of prejudice over time, see Dovidio and Gaertner (1986) and McConahay (1986). The housing study is reported in Yinger (1995).

  5. For research on automatic versus conscious prejudice see Devine (1989); Devine and Monteith (1999); Fazio (2001); and Banaji (2001). The study with the college students is by Dovidio et al. (1997).

  6. See Payne (2001) for more details of this study.

  7. See the Implicit Association Test website: http://buster.cs.yale.edu/iniplicit/)//enottxt/.

  8. For research on shyness see Cheek and Melchior (1990) and Cheek and Krasnoperova ( 1999).

  9. For writings on this school of thought, called symbolic interactionism, see Cooley (1902); Mead (1934).

  10. Oltmanns, Turkheimer, and Thomas (2000). For a review of similar studies, see Kenny and DePaulo (1993) and Shrauger a
nd Schoeneman (1979).

  11. Armor and Taylor (1998); Taylor and Brown (1988).

  10. Observing and Changing Our Behavior

  Epigraphs: Bronte (1847/ 1985), chap. 14; Vonnegut (1966), p. v.

  1. Muller (2001).

  2. Grafton quoted in Waxman (2001), p. C8.

  3. Forster (1927/1961),p. 97.

  4. See Ryle (1949) and Bern (1972).

  5. The study in which people were asked to gather signatures was by Kiesler, Nisbett, and Zanna (1969). For more on the fundamental attribution error, see Ross and Nisbett (1991). For evidence that people in Western cultures are especially prone to the fundamental attribution error, and that people in East Asian cultures are less prone, see Choi, Nisbett, and Norenzayan (1999).

  6. For a review of research on this "overjustification effect," see Deci, Koestner, and Ryan (1999); Lepper, Henderlong, and Gingras (1999).

  7. Aristotle (1962), p. 34; James (1890), pp. 49-50.

  8. Real quoted in Brody (1997), p. F1. For Real's approach to depression, particularly in men, see Real (1997).

  9. For a review of the Teen Outreach program, see Allen et al. (1997).

  10. Post (1922), chap. 17.

  11. David Polonoff (1987) and Dan McAdams (1996) offer useful criteria by which to judge narratives, such as coherence (i.e., that a story be logically consistent) and openness to change. Both also argue that accuracy is a key criterion, but the criterion for accuracy is not well specified.

  12. Gergen and Kaye (1992), p. 175.

  13. Ibid., pp. 177-178.

  14. Brunstein, Schultheiss, and Grassmann (1998).

  15. Didion (1979), pp. 12-13.

  16. Freud (1937/1976),p.266.

  17. Zajonc quoted in Stephens (1992),p.40.

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